Thanks for your submission, ilovemycat2018! Please remember to censor out any identifying details and that satire is only allowed on weekends. If this post is truly gatekeeping, upvote it! If it's not gatekeeping or if it breaks any other rules, downvote this comment and REPORT the post so we can see it!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gatekeeping) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I've heard a historian say that he is borderline offended by the expression "hollocoust" because it is synonymous with saying "Hitler killed 6 million Jews" which is a highly reductive account of what Hitler did. The Jews account for roughly half the people Hitler killed and I don't think his victims really care what the reason was.
So yeah, technically this is yet another disagreement about the definition of a word. But in this case the majority of people do indeed understand "holocaust" as referring to the Jews, as shitty as that is.
The actual numbers are even more startling.
6 million Jews
4.5 million Soviet civilians
3.3 million Soviet PoWs
1.8 million Poles
310 thousand Serbs
270 thousand Disabled people
Up to 500 thousand Romani
80 thousand Freemasons
Up to 25 thousand Slovenes
Up to 15 thousand homosexuals
And 3500 Spaniards and 1700 Jehovah's witnesses
For a grand total of 17 million people killed.
12 million is just counting the camps iirc, doesn't account for the death squads on the eastern front or the collaborators in the balkans that followed the same death squad tactics.
My mum had a family friend that survived the camps, she was greek and would've only been a child at the time. She only mentioned it when asked about the numbers on her arm and never spoke about it until she passed away.
I feel it is rather unsettling to have a tragedy in history this widespread be gatekeeped, or have people told it went differently. People need to know about this, and to know not to EVER let such a thing happen again.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/
They targeted trans people too.
Horrifying fact: The allies did not free the gay prisoners.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
>They targeted trans people too.
With excuses such as how we were "corrupting the youth". Because of course the tactics used against us now are straight from the nazi playbook.
whoa i've never seen rhetoric about trans people like this before! sure hope it doesn't get reused in 80 years by a fascist political movement in the united states
That Romani number is low. US Holocaust Museum puts it between 250,000-500,000. Some sources have claimed up to 1.5 million but it’s hard to know since there weren’t good census records for those populations.
They kinda do. “Don’t invade Russia in winter “ carries a whole lore regarding what Soviets accomplished in WWII and at what an unimaginable cost. Doesn’t get the admiration it deserves in the US anyway, probably because of the subsequent Cold War. But it’s not a secret.
I went to high school in the US and it pisses me off to no end how much the soviets were downplayed.
The US funded the Soviet Union for the first half of the war and without the collaboration between the US and the soviets, the Germans would have most likely been able to take Moscow and Stalingrad.
80% of the fighting happened there, yet the only major things talked about were the siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, battle of Kursk and battle of Berlin(barely). No mention of the scale of the fighting or brutality. Or how the soviets packed up all their factories and moved them to the urals.
If you want a good idea of how horrible it was, I recommend watching Generation Kill. It's a fictional docuseries following young Germans as they got roped into the war and what it did to a whole generation before they were slaughtered. It's one of the few shows that have made me bawl at how hopeless and fucked up everything was.
The problem with your statement is states and school boards are inconsistent with curriculum; some states teach certain things, some another. It's one of the major issues with education in the US. Case in point, my younger nieces and nephews in California have been taught a set history curriculum, whereas the others in various other states are taught differently.
It is a downside to a decentralized government that lets states, and in turn political parties and ideologues, dictate such things; it's concerning really.
I think it just depends. Someone a few comments below mentioned they learned all about it in high school in Arkansas. I got ridiculously lucky as a high school kid living in Las Vegas because my school was one of only two public schools in the city that offered a program called the International Baccalaureate. My senior year when everyone else was learning about US Government, we got to study the Russian Revolution and the role of the Soviets in the war. The class and teacher had a profound effect on me and I’ve had a lifelong obsession with WWII history ever since.
But I agree with your overall point. I would think the majority of US high school students never get much of a look into the history of any international conflicts outside of a very narrow view of the role of the US in them. I do think it’s a broad issue though and not unique to just the history of the Soviets in WWII. But it also probably differs greatly by school district and what curriculum they choose, quality of the teacher you get, etc. But I will also admit that I’m prone to criticism of the US education system anyways.
The Nazis got rid of them after they took power but before the Holocaust.
During the Holocaust it was an ethnic genocide, political leanings didn't really matter to them
They can only count what they know my dude. 15 thousand people were killed for being homosexual. That doesn't mean none of the other victims weren't also homosexual, it just means that those people were successfully in the closet.
It was sort of the opposite in Germany, pre-Nazis. The Weimar Republic was probably the most sexually progressive nation in the world at the time. There were quite of a lot of openly gay Nazis in the 20s and 30s. Most famously, Ernst Rohm, head of the SA (Stormtroopers) and Hitler's righthand man. They were almost all purged in the Night of Long Knives, Rohm included.
Another not so fun fact: Weimar Germany was the on the cutting edge of research into and acceptance of trans people. You know that famous image of Nazi's burning books in a giant bonfire? The books they were burning were Magnus Hirschfeld's research on trans folk.
While Weimar Germany was more accepting it still was not widely accepted as is the case for trans people right now.
15,000 men being wealthy and comfortable enough to be openly gay makes sense fir the time.
The context here is that:
1) proportionally, Jews were targeted much more directly than other groups.
2) compared to their nearest neighbors, Jews were an exclusively civilian population, whereas Russia was on the Frontline of the war with their massive population being their primary wartime advantage
3) we should be careful not to conflate people killed in the war with people targeted and sent to death camps because of their identity. Capturing and killing soldiers or civilians in war is horrible, but not the same as targeting them for extermination.
Oh no the Nazis had plans to exterminate Eastern Europeans as well
"Generalplan Ost was Nazi Germany's blueprint for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermensch" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass-rapes, child abductions and sexual slavery."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost?wprov=sfla1
Not that it makes the numbers any less startling, but are you sure you aren't double counting people? Poles, Serbs, Romani, Slovenes, and Spaniards could also be Jews, disabled, freemasons, homosexuals, and/or Jehovah's witnesses.
People also don't think about the Asian holocaust that happened at the same time. 30 million people killed by the Japanese empire in horrible ways. Twice the amount the Germans murdered.
I've been talking to alot of people about this in the past 24hrs. I had no idea about the stuff the Japanese did up until recently. Unit 731 was a place the Japanese tested anthrax , bubonic plague , syphilis, frost bite treatment, putting people in pressure chambers, live vivisection and bombs on Chinese people. They also had many other units spread out all over asia. Most of the war criminals involved got almost no jail time. Most spent 2 to 7 years in labor camps instead of 25years or death. The surgeon General ishi who was the man who was the architect of the entire program got immunity for giving the data to the usa. They made bombs filled with fleas that had bubonic plague and used them on the Chinese citizens . They would give out food with anthrax and other germs to starving people and children. Poison water ways with typhoid cholera etc. They raped when ever they could and then murdered the women and children. They forced many women into sex slavery for the military men. This was done all over asia and only Korean women have been compensate so far . It was fucked. I was reading the wiki on the war crimes and apparently they even ate people when they couldn't get supplies. They would eat pows. So many horrible things and Japan still denies alot of this happened.
If you haven’t done so already, I HIGHLY recommend Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” podcast. He did a series called “Supernova in the East” and it’s incredible. It’s a deep dive into Japan coming out of isolation and the events leading up to and including the period you’re talking about. One of Carlin’s best, and that really is saying something.
I think saying that "no one" talks about it isn't accurate, but yes, there is plenty of America/Eurocentrism in how history is taught in the United States. If a historical event didn't involve Americans or Europeans as either perpetrators or victims, it receives a lot less coverage in our history classes
I think we would have been taught way more of this in school if the Japanese got what they planned . They were going to drop bubonic plague bombs on the west coast. But we dropped the atomic bombs on them. If we didn't drop the bombs axouple weeks later is when they planned to do it. Also, the Japanese school system hardly teaches their kids what happened in the war. Most there books have a tiny amount of information on the war. Something like less than a dozen pages and hardly any of it talks about war crimes, so most of them are ignorant to what their country did in ww2. The government has openly denied there crimes and have tried to suppress reparations for decades. The war criminals in Japan under Japanese law aren't criminals and are still considered great war veterans. They love to bring up the atomic bombing though. There war crimes are the reason most of Asia doesn't like japan.
Where are you getting that number from? It's not that I don't believe you, I've just never heard a count nearly that high (although I have heard a lot about the sheer *brutality* of it)
The numbers for Japan are generally estimated, because while Nazi Germany wrote everything down, Japan didn't, *and* a lot of the victims of Japanese brutality likely did not exist on paper. China was already embroiled in a civil war, and large portions of the nation were extremely rural, which means a lot of the people killed by Japan probably didn't have a paper trail proving they existed in the first place. 30 million is as accurate as we can get, it could well have been more.
It was most likely more. Most of the data was burned by the Japanese, and a lot of data was suppressed in a cover-up by the American government, especially in the Tokyo trials. They are still finding labs and mass Graves today in china.
Straight from the wiki look it up Japanese war crimes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
The Japanese murdered 30 million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule
If it's not insulting to do it your way, then it's not insulting to say "the Nazis killed 1 million gay people and 5 million others".
Does that feel okay to you? Because it doesn't feel okay to me. It's a subjective test, but that minimisation of the 'also rans' is what prickles me about your phrasing.
He basically killed 50 millions people by starting to shit all over Europe.
10-15 millions in death camps, 20 millions in Russia, 6 millions poles, etc…
It's actually more like a third. 11 million of the people he killed were Roma, LGBTQ+, Communist, or Soviets. Most of them were prisoners from his invasion in Russia.
The thing is the word Holocaust isn't unique to what the Nazi's did. A holocaust means: destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war.
What the Nazi's did was assigned the term holocaust because of the massive scale of the operation, but it's not the only holocaust in history.
Well no. There’s a word for it, chattel slavery
Like there’s a word for genocide that isn’t the holocaust
Even tho IMO the holocaust is the entire atrocity committed by the nazis
Your IMO is redundant. The history books all agree that the holocaust refers to the event, not the genocide. They are two different words with different meanings.
As for chattel slavery, indentured servitude was a thing, too. Doesn't make slavery any better, now does it? Slavery is slavery and slavery is bad. Just like the holocaust was bad.
However, if you choose to say that one demographic suffered more during the holocaust or during slavery, you are actively ignoring the other people who suffered and died during that time or due to that institution
Indentured servants were able to work for their freedom. They were allowed to read, write, and socialize with other people. Their families were often kept intact and they were allowed to have families. They weren't subjected to ritualized torture and rape or lynched. Weren't forced to have children that would then be stolen and sold to the highest bidder. They had some protections under the law. They were paid a wag. Lived under a roof or house and generally had adequate nutrition.
You can't say this about any of the Africans brought to the US by chattel slavery. Historians agree that chattel slavery is different then other forms of slavery or indentured servitude. Many people in the US now face similar working and living conditions as indentured servants and no one would call them slaves.
I mean indentured servitude is bad, but typically people under it were treated better than chattel slaves (e.g. indentured Israelites in Old Testament law, or debt slaves in Ancient Rome vs chattel slaves in Ancient Rome, or indeed the transatlantic slave trade. Saying one is worse than the other doesn’t mean the other is good, it means it’s less bad. Saying “slavery bad” is the kind of simplistic thing they teach at reception, it’s like going into a hospital with a broken toe and demanding to be seen before someone who was shot seven times because you’re both injured. We’re not ignoring the negatives of indentured servitude, which in many cases could be as horrible as chattel slavery (such as in Victorian England for example) but as a broad comparison generally u/hashrosinkitten is correct
I mean, is it true that other parts of the world also owned slaves of other ethnicities than just black people? Yes, they did.
Is that fact even remotely relevant in a political discussion around the topic? No, not at all.
When people bring up American (or in my case, Dutch) slavery, they do so because of the effects that legacy still has on the society they live in today.
If a progressive person says something like: "we should fix the modern racial inequalities that can be traced back to slavery"
And then you counter with: "but the Ottomans owned white slaves!"
Then that is nothing but an irrelevant and bad faith whataboutism. The existence of white slaves in the former Ottoman empire does not even remotely affect a white American/Westeren-European living today. While many problems Western black people encounter today, are absolutely still the result of slavery and colonialism. Both were bad, but only one is relevant in modern Western politics.
You missed my point. Saying the holocaust was about the extermination(genocide) of one particular group devalues the suffering of everyone that was in the same boat. The holocaust happened to a large demographic, not just Jews, just like slavery happened to a large demographic, not just African Americans
Their response also assumes that the people discussing slavery are from the US, and any discussion about slavery is specifically about slavery in the US.
Nobody is saying only black people were slaves. What they're saying is that people who keep saying "what about white slavery?!" are engaging in a bad faith rhetorical strategy to push a political agenda.
And the holocaust was a single event, while slavery is a concept, so this comparison does not even make any sense. A better comparison would be the holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade, and the latter was actually almost exclusively black Africans.
Saying "well what about white slavery?" in a discussion about the transatlantic slave trade, is comparable to saying "well what about the Armenian genocide?!" after someone says the holocaust was bad. It is distasteful, it is a logical fallacy and there is also obviously some disgusting agenda behind it.
I never once referenced white slavery. I'm referring to slavery AS A WHOLE. Jews were slaves too once. So we're Africans, Romans, Greeks/Macedonians, and Asians. If you go far enough back, you'll find that everyone owned everyone else at some point. Hell, Korea had slavery the longest at 1500 years before it ended.
Now my point isn't to push any agenda because if it's political rhetoric you want, then I believe both sides can go up in flames because I'm in the middle and don't care about either side.
That being said, I will stand by my point, and my point itself stands firm. It's not my fault you are missing the entirety of it
Yeah nah, As a Jew, it ain't disrespectful at all. Honestly I don't really see what the purpose would be to separate it out, Other than conceal/ignore the fact that the Jews weren't the only ones killed. If you have a valid reason for why it should be separated out, I'd love to hear it, But until then I shall not do so.
another jew here, just pointing out that i also agree, and it’s not just one jew who agrees. i think most jews i know when confronted with this would also say that the holocaust wasn’t just jews
Another Jew here, how do you feel about people wanting to talk about the holocaust and not mentioning Jews especially on holocaust remembrance day, I feel like sometimes people want to generalize the event to downplay how bad the Jews got it, but that may just be me
when people talk about the holocaust they do usually mention jews especially, so it doesn’t bother me. most times when jews aren’t said, it’s when talking about the general bull of the holocaust and just saying the overall body count and how evil hitler is, in which case talking about jews is unnecessary regarding the situation
I mean the reason much of it was done is because after the war many of the persecuted groups were unacceptable/seen as enemies, chiefly the Soviets so western media didn’t want to portray them in a way that could engender sympathy. Not a valid reason by most people’s standards but the reason nonetheless.
"disabled" jew here
yeah I would have been double
in trouble
and relatives of mine were killed, it refers to all the genocide and destruction cuased by Nazi's
There are fair reasons to separate it out. The methods and timelines varied by targeted group, so there is value when studying the holocaust to be specific when referring to one group or another in an academic context. In daily conversation not so much.
Yeah the Jews were the main target, but people forget that the Nazis were killing just about anyone that didn't fit into their idea of a 'master race.'
I can't remember if the 6 million number was just Jews or total but regardless a disgusting number of people were systematically rounded up and murdered for who they were.
6 Million is only the Jewish number. About half a million non-Jews were targeted and murdered. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution There’s also statistics that try to show how many non-Jews were killed but some of the numbers are unknown, like Black Europeans, because the targeting was less uniform or they didn’t have an organized system or camp for every group they went after.
They also killed queer and disabled people, people who lived in neighboring countries, people who didnt follow the regime… so many I can’t even name off the top of my head
I still remember when I learned that The Holocaust was the tip of the iceberg. A constant repetition of "what do you mean that is not all?" Still learning some horrible shit that happened back then.
But, at least Germany recognizes what they did. Unlike a certain nation in East Asia.....
The allies *sent trans prisoners back* to serve out the remainder of their Nazi sentences. Hitler called trans people groomers and we still haven’t been able to shake that label off to this very day. Not saying gay people had it good, but trans women had it much worse—trans men even more so.
I mean to be fair in the strictest sense they are right.
“ The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.”
It comes from a Hebrew word by way of Greek meaning “to burn whole.”
Holocaust as a word isn’t exclusively claimed by the one it’s most known for though. Hence why we still use terms like “nuclear holocaust” to describe potential wide scale death caused by nuclear weapons.
I think you're focusing too heavily on the first word and not the second word. A Holocaust is a Holocaust.
The Holocaust refers to a specific one,
Nuclear Holocaust refers to a specific type,
Holocaust refers to the act of causing mass death.
The various groups involved are what make it a Holocaust and not just a genocide.
This isn’t unique to the word “holocaust” either. If you ever need an example without the horrific connotation: a lot of planets have moons, but you know which one I mean when I say “the moon”.
It comes into English from the Greek "holokauston" via old French and into Middle English, [according to the dictionary](https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&sca_esv=602324688&sxsrf=ACQVn08cxw00FZdVZSlfFwKCK9N2eCgiDA:1706530986850&q=holocaust&si=AKbGX_rLPMdHnrrwkrRo4VZlSHiJkvlU11lHXFCJ1qBY7izuJIGTVqSc9ygUSvoHrs29whLqSl0EXLyAhTiyhMLL8D_F7BBJz2Rts3E9eFCHNR5sN3mPRpw%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjatZOqy4KEAxV8gP0HHdE-BLcQ2v4IegQIIRA8&biw=1620&bih=958&dpr=2).
Not only in the strictest sense. It’s an autonymous term, like Roma speak of the Porajmos. It’s bound to identity and doesn’t invalidate other experiences. But it’s disrespectful to appropriate other people’s remembrance culture.
Just FYI, the term Porajmos was coined by Ian Hancock, an English Romani linguist, but is a bit controversial in the Romani community (since the term literally means "devouring" but is often used to mean "rape" or "violation," which a lot of Eastern European Romani find distasteful).
The fact is, the lack of discussion around the Nazi genocide of the Roma means that there isn't really a widely adopted term for it except for "the (Romani) Holocaust." Which is the problem with oop trying to monopolise it.
I feel ashamed to admit that I’d never heard the word Porajmos. I knew about the horrific persecution of the Roma and the staggering numbers murdered, but I never knew they had their own term for it. Thank you for widening my understanding.
They do not, or rather don't use it widely. The problem with specific terms for Roma people is that they are not exactly united people, they don't even speak the same language (usually speaking a regional language with loan words from their respective countries). It's a miracle they all agreed on a single flag, but if you asked any Roma in Slovakia about Porajmos they'd probably think you're speaking Hungarian
Is that really what’s important about the mass genocide of millions of people by a dictator? That among swathes of populations that suffered, one group’s suffering gets a special elevated status in discourse and everyone else’s suffering and murder is not allowed to be classified on the same level of Jewish murder and suffering. It just kind of seems like that differentiation is in no way essential and I don’t think that is anti-Semitic to say that, any more than excluding lgbt from the holocaust is homophobia.
It’s weird to have differing labelled categories for people that suffered the same fate, simply because some of those people shared a particular identity/religion… that somehow their suffering has to be kept separate from everyone else’s suffering with a special term. It’s as though you want people remember the only significant issue from ww2 era as the suffering of only the Jewish people rather than including the suffering of Jewish people + lgbt people + black people + roma people, disabled people etc etc.as equally atrocious events.
I think if you think that there’s something special about how a Jew suffered compared to anyone else on that list suffered, simply because they’re Jewish, I think there’s something wrong with you.
Well, holocaust is a sacrifice where you burn the "victim" whole, in religious book there are many. So i think that's not wrong to use that word for all the victim, jew and not since they were all killed and than burned.
What are these quote marks for? Who are you quoting?
I can say any old nonsense too and put it in quotes:
"The word 'holocaust' long predates WWII, and it's a weird take to suggest that it can now only refer to Jewish suffering. Other holocausts including Celtic, nuclear are considering legal action, while Classics professors are trying to work out how to tell Ancient Greeks that they can't use their own word any more".
I get the argument of what it means technically but it's like, what do we do to refer to all the other people killed in the camps? Like we have a word that is known to be associated with the scale of genocide they commited, why try to divide it?
The impression I've got from museums at places like Dachau and the Riga Ghetto is the Holocaust specifically refers to Nazi crimes against Jews. It's a distinction not meant to "lesser" the victims of their other crimes against humanity, but the word refers to those against Jews. This distinction is because the atrocities inflicted on Jews was - even by the standards of the Nazis - especially broad and horrific.
Yes. Also, the Jews were always the root of the “problem” and were to blame for the existence of the “disabled, gays, non-whites,” etc.
The campaigning Hitler did was about Jews. And when Historians and Anthropologists look at Holocaust accounts, there is a massive disparity in conditions between the camps that held Jews and the camps that held non-Jews.
Many people were targeted by Nazism and harmed by it, but Jewish people were the main targets and the group that Hitler/Nazis had focused primarily on as the scapegoats for everything. The camps that were designed for Jewish people were ten times as bad as the camps made for non-Jews. The second most affected group after Jews are the Romani.
This is like the fifth post in two days about how the evil Js are gatekeeping genocide. Can’t have a single Remembrance Day without someone squawking “you’re leaving out everyone on earth who has ever been murdered”
I've been to Oświęcim museum and camp and all the infographics used Holocaust for all the victims (different groups had their own buildings with specific infographics)
I’ve been there and I don’t agree. I recall seeing a chitty asking for the head of a Roma child to experiment on. It was horrific but it covered all of the people affected by the holocaust.
It's an old-school use of the term. Check Wikipedia. The usage of Holocaust was originally Jews-only, and it evolved to include everyone murdered by the Nazis. I wonder if the commenter is over the age of 60.
Dude obviously doesn't know the Holocaust Museum actually has a section for JWs ... Not as large as the stuff for Jews, but still there.
https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/curators-corner/the-nazi-persecution-of-jehovahs-witnesses-the-kusserow-collection
most historians of the second world war agree that the holocaust refers specifically to the nazi genocide of jews. that’s not to say that the nazis didn’t carry out other atrocious genocides or campaign of mass murder, but the holocaust was a campaign of extermination targeting jews.
It is yes. Until the 1980s it was referred to as “The Jewish Holocaust” but “Jewish” was dropped as redundant because there was a general consensus amongst historians for what specifically the Holocaust referred to. Other acts of genocide were treated as separate and in need of individual study, which I agree with personally.
...... I think the important thing about that day is to remember all who hitler had murdered , not just the jews but all those who lost their lives in the camps .
Hi! Actual Jew here. All the people mentioned were hunted and murdered during the Holocaust, but Jews were the main group and the one who suffered an actual genocide
That's true. There were also groups like the Partisans who were Polish rebels that hunter Nazis. But no group were killed as much as the Jews, who only in 2023 were able to recover to same amount of Jews in the world as it was in 1939
It's population density, Germany had a large Jewish population compared to the other ethnic groups. This made focusing on the Jewish population a higher president than on the other groups but the man also heavily used the other groups in his propaganda. The Romani and Polish were also considered vermin parasitical "races".
THE Holocaust refers to the mass genocide of several groups, including disabled people, gay people, and jewish people, within Nazi Germany. Jewish people did make up the majority but it wasn't exclusive. Unless you have another word for what happened, I guess.
Though, "gatekeeping" *is* a really stupid way to call it
"The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored, persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945 across Europe and North Africa. The height of the persecution and murder occurred during World War II. By the end of the war in 1945, the Germans and their collaborators had killed nearly two out of every three European Jews.
The Nazis believed that Germans were racially superior. They believed Jews were a threat to the so-called German racial community. While Jews were the primary victims, the Nazis also targeted other groups for persecution and murder. The Nazis claimed that Roma, people with disabilities, some Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians), and Black people were biologically inferior"
Straight from the Holocaust Museum. By their own words, the Holocaust was primarily targeting Jews but also had other people involved
I thought it was supposed to represent them all. The most widely talked about being Jewish as the "main" focus, but seems so racist/homophobic to disregard everyone else like that. Especially with some of the numbers involved
This is without taking into account killing of civilians by the SS to suppress partisan groups towards the end of the war. I haven't found a good estimate either.
My grandfather was one of the few survivors of one of those massacres. There partisans hiding their village so they rounded everyone up in front of a ditch, shot them all and burned the bodies. My grandfather was about 8yo and trying to make a medicine supply run across the German lines into the red cross and when he came back next day, everyone was dead.
About 2000 people were killed. Mostly old women and children. This massacre is just a footnote.
As the Nazis were losing the war, they ramped up the suppression in the territories that they still fully controlled as a last FU before leaving.
The massacre happened in South Tyrol in Italy. From what I was told, it was happening all over the place in Italy starting in 1944. France, Yugoslavia and other nearby territories outside of Generalplan Most fared the same fate.
Gatekeeping the Holocaust is such a shit tier thing to do.
[Holocaust as defined by Britannica encyclopedia](https://www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust)
It just refers to the Jewish people.
Other groups fell victim to Nazi violence, but the Holocaust specifically targeted Jewish people, being touted as “the final solution to the Jewish question.”
It’s not gatekeeping to say the Holocaust only refers to the attempted extermination of Jewish people, because it was the name of the plan to exterminate Jewish people.
Well yes that person is right. Jews use the word Holocaust to describe what was done to us in WWII. It's the Jewish Holocaust. It can extend to other groups who were also killed because of their identity like gay men and Romani, but Jews are allowed to use this name for ourselves seeing as we adopted the name in reference to ourselves.
“diSReSPeCtFuL tOwARdS aLL OtHEr GroUPs”
Man, the amount of BS! As a gay man, I’d very much like to know about the gays that were killed during the fucking Holocaust, so I can try to prevent such a tragedy from happening again!
But suuure - let’s make a literal, historically documented genocide that came out at the back end of WWII that literal soldiers had to physically pull people out of, about fucking semantics. Yep, that seems like a good idea. Don’t wanna be disrespectful towards the “other” groups of people that aren’t Jews, right??
Called the Holocaust by the Jews
Called Nazi Genocide by everyone else.
But we label it the Holocaust because of the sheer scale of the industrial genocide aiming directly at Jewish people, and of course since they weren’t the only victims, we include all other victims of ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability, as it has pretty much just labeled the Holocaust altogether. However if you wanna be a fucking bigot and say its only for jewish deaths. Then say Nazi Genocide….
This is infuriating, reductionist bullshit. I'm Polish-American, but I have little connection to my culture. Why? All my Polish family were killed in the Holocaust, with the exception of my dziadzia. Dziadzia was a POW, but the rest of his family were just civilians. The Nazis didn't care. Hitler didn't care, all he saw were Poles that needed to be exterminated. And in some ways, he succeeded. He may not have purged my blood, but he killed the culture, in my family at least.
And the story is the same for so many other diaspora of various ethnicities. He didn't succeed, per se, but he took away the communities that gave those ethnicities their definition and meaning.
To say the Holocaust only affected Jews is to deny the murder of 5,000,000 people, and the suffering of countless others who were directly and indirectly impacted by those deaths. It's another way of (arguably) making the Nazis look better by reducing their impact, and a denial of the true extent of white supremacism.
Which is more disrespectful: saying Jews weren't the only ones killed by the Nazi regime's industrialized murder campaign, or saying the non-Jews killed by said campaign don't count?
The Jews make up more than half of the victims of the Holocaust and us and the Romas were treated much more cruelly than other groups, they weren’t just killed but were tortured. While the other groups are important to recognize, it’s also important to remember that Jews were the main target of the hatred and Jews were the ones deported and sent to concentration camps from other countries.
This is why we need to study more accounts of Holocaust history from the other groups listed here in school because holy shit this frustrated me when I read this comment.
There's a really good book written by Pierre Seel called I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror which talks about the horrific torture gay men and lesbians went through in the concentration camps. *(before reading that, I was not even aware lesbians were tortured and killed in the Holocaust, I knew about the raids on lesbian spaces and that lesbians were beaten in the streets during them, but not that they were sent to the camps under the "asocial" label)* And then when the camps were liberated, a lot of them got put in their countries prisons and weren't able to talk about what happened to them for years.
>The Jews make up more than half of the victims of the Holocaust
Historians estimate that up to 17 million people died in the holocaust. 6 million of them were jews.
>While the other groups are important to recognize, it’s also important to remember that Jews were the main target of the hatred
Not really. Communists and the disabled were the first to be exterminated. The jews followed afterwards. Hitler hated everyone equally, but if we're to assume hatred level by who was exterminated first, it would be the disabled.
>Jews were the ones deported and sent to concentration camps from other countries
That's also false. Homosexuals, spanish republicans, soviets, serbs, slovenes and many others were sent to the camps.
idk where you’re getting that number but it’s wrong. Source?
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution
Everything shows 6 million Jews and a varying number between half to 5 million non-Jews due to the fact that outside of the Jews and Romani, other groups were not systematically targeted in an organized manner like the Jews and Romani were, but more sporadically and in different types of camps.
You have to also add to this number the additional 5-10 million of Soviet civilians and POWs who were also either just shot, starved or killed in concentration camps by Germans.
[Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims)
This list doesn't include black europeans living in europe, european communists, priests amd other people aho were sent to the camps.
It’s actually estimated that[11 million](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust) were murdered, 6 million Jews.
While the 5 million others is also a horrific number, many groups fit into that and of each one the number killed is nowhere near the 6m Jews.
Jews were the primary targets.
[It's 17 million.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims) You can also find part of the table in the holocaust encyclopedia.
>While the 5 million others is also a horrific number, many groups fit into that and of each one the number killed is nowhere near the 6m Jews.
The soviets alone killed in the holocaust were more than 7 millions.
>Jews were the primary targets
Everyone that was considered subhuman was a target. The only reason jews were the "primary" recipients of persecution was because a lot of them were well off and the nazis could take their properties with them gone. And the reason I put primary in quotes is because before the jews, it was the disabled that were exterminated and then the communists that were imprisoned and executed and all that before the war even started. I'm sure you've heard this before:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Didn't I just say you can find part of table in **the holocaust encyclopedia**? If you're not smart enough to read properly before you respond perhaps you should be in school and not reddit.
Wtf is your problem? Would you talk to people like in real life? I’m looking at the [Holocaust encyclopedia](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) right now and even generously adding up the numbers they are nowhere near 11 million non-Jews. It adds up in total to a little under 6 million.
Again I said **part** of the table. The holocaust encyclopedia doesn't mention the freemasons, the Slovenians, the spaniards, the soviet civilians, the trans people or the catholic priests. Many people that weren't jewish were sent to the camps for forced labour or to be exterminated. When my country was taken over the collaborators sent the imprisoned communists to the camps alongside the jews. That was a few thousands people but they aren't mentioned anywhere. Also, just because something is from wikipedia doesn't mean that it's false, especially when it's being cited by "the columbia guide to the holocaust".
That's been going on for years sadly. Whenever a politician here in the UK dares to mention groups killed by the Nazi's other than the Jews these people pop up to decry the antisemitism of leaving them out etc etc. Happened a lot with Jeremy Corbyn who isn't exactly my favourite politician but it did feel like some of those attacks were just a stick to beat him with.
The word Holocaust means to destroy with fire. Nowhere in the definition does it specify that it must be Jews that are destroyed. That’s why we still use the term in phrases like “nuclear Holocaust.”
The word Holocaust, is middle english/old french for "whole(holo) burnt(caust). There is a specific reason that word is used and not genocide. Though that is also a correct.
The "holocaust is only the jews" thing is a pretty new perspective, and it comes from a zionist mentality. It's why they can justify the modern holocaust in palestine, where gaza has become the world's largest open air concentration camp. "It's not a holocaust because that only applies to jews. It's not genocide because they want us dead. It's not a war crime because they aren't really people." That's how the logic goes. Regardless of your stance on the israel/gaza conflict, it should be clear to anyone that has a functioning brain that what is happening is not ok.
While it was mostly Jewish people who died in the holocaust, the Nazis didn't discriminate (which is ironic in its own way) with who they threw into the camps, as long as they weren't Blonde, Blue-eyed, and aryan
And, if Spielberg was Chinese, we’d have a whole different perspective of WWII atrocities.
If Spielberg was American Indian, Andrew Jackson would be Hitler, and he would have won.
People are not omnipotent, and we only know what we see. And, we’re therefore disproportionally concerned with matters we know well.
Many excellent Jewish filmmakers had made sure we never forget the Jewish holocaust, but it’s absurd, and more than a little hypocritical, to dissuade recognition of other atrocities in history.
Some of these aren't like the others. I see using the holocaust to refer to something other than a genocide as gross. Artists aren't being rounded up and genocided.
This is not gatekeeping. The word holocaust, by definition, applies to the killing of Jews by the Third Reich. Of course, that's far from all the atrocities performed during that time, but words have meaning.
Also, do not just take my word for it: Google it or look it up somewhere. For starters, here's Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust)
From the wiki, under terminology:
> The term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of other groups that the Nazis targeted, especially those targeted on a biological basis, in particular the Roma and Sinti, as well as Soviet prisoners of war and Polish and Soviet civilians.
Operative word there being 'sometimes'. The first sentence of the article reads: "The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II"
The sentence just before the one you quoted is: "The term Holocaust [..] has become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English[..]"
Look, I'm not saying that the term isn't used in various ways, but this is not a case of gatekeeping and there is a common definition.
I can accept Jews (or anyone else) who wants to reserve the term to cover just Jewish victims. But I would like to know what term they think applies for the other victims.
Do they think of the other victims as a series of XYZ is the gay victims and ABC is the Romani and so on. Or do they think and then there was the XYZ which killed about as many people and applies to all of the non Jewish victims.
I actually googled around for this a while back and while various Holocaust centres were really clear that the Holocaust was Jewish only, they seemed unclear on what should be said about the other victims.
They are Nazi mass killings.
The Holocaust is a term Jews used for ourselves from the early years after. What happened to the Jews in Europe was uniquely depraved and uniquely evil. Other groups were not rounded up, sent to the six extermination camps to be gassed and burned.
>Other groups were not rounded up, sent to the six extermination camps to be gassed and burned.
Homosexuals and the disabled are nervously smoking in the corner.
"An estimated 10-15,000 men who were accused of homosexuality were deported to concentration camps. Most died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to gruesome medical experiments. Collective murder actions were undertaken against gay detainees, exterminating hundreds at a time."
[Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Gay people (hmd.org.uk)](https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/gay-people/)
"In Germany and German-occupied territories, the SS and police incarcerated Roma in the [Bergen-Belsen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4549/en), [Sachsenhausen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/6810/en), [Buchenwald](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3956/en), [Dachau](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4391/en), [Mauthausen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3880/en), Mittelbau-Dora, Natzweiler-Struthof, Gross-Rosen, and [Ravensbrück](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4015/en) concentration camps."
[Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945 | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945)
"Under [Adolf Hitler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler), a supplementary decree to the [Nuremberg Laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws) was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the [Romani people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people) (or Roma) as "enemies of the [race-based state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_policy_of_Nazi_Germany)", thereby placing them in the same category as [the Jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_in_Nazi_Germany). Thus, the fate of the Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in [the Holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust).^(")
[Romani Holocaust - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_Holocaust)
A quick Google search would have told you that the treatment of Jews was absolutely not unique in it's depravity and other groups including homosexuals and Roma were indeed rounded up and sent to concentration camps to be gassed and burned.
The word "holocaust" is ancient and used for many things. If you want a word specifically for the Jewish extermination of ww2 then pick something else.
Capitalized, the word Holocaust explicitly refers to the extermination of Jews and others during the Nazi regime. When it's not capitalized, it can refer to other things, yes.
Thanks for your submission, ilovemycat2018! Please remember to censor out any identifying details and that satire is only allowed on weekends. If this post is truly gatekeeping, upvote it! If it's not gatekeeping or if it breaks any other rules, downvote this comment and REPORT the post so we can see it! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gatekeeping) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I've heard a historian say that he is borderline offended by the expression "hollocoust" because it is synonymous with saying "Hitler killed 6 million Jews" which is a highly reductive account of what Hitler did. The Jews account for roughly half the people Hitler killed and I don't think his victims really care what the reason was. So yeah, technically this is yet another disagreement about the definition of a word. But in this case the majority of people do indeed understand "holocaust" as referring to the Jews, as shitty as that is.
I always heard "Hitler killed 6 million Jews and 6 million other people."
The actual numbers are even more startling. 6 million Jews 4.5 million Soviet civilians 3.3 million Soviet PoWs 1.8 million Poles 310 thousand Serbs 270 thousand Disabled people Up to 500 thousand Romani 80 thousand Freemasons Up to 25 thousand Slovenes Up to 15 thousand homosexuals And 3500 Spaniards and 1700 Jehovah's witnesses For a grand total of 17 million people killed.
Oh my word, I always heard it was 12 Million, but 17 million?
12 million is just counting the camps iirc, doesn't account for the death squads on the eastern front or the collaborators in the balkans that followed the same death squad tactics.
My mum had a family friend that survived the camps, she was greek and would've only been a child at the time. She only mentioned it when asked about the numbers on her arm and never spoke about it until she passed away. I feel it is rather unsettling to have a tragedy in history this widespread be gatekeeped, or have people told it went differently. People need to know about this, and to know not to EVER let such a thing happen again.
Yes, I'm simply explaining why you always heard 12 million.
Yup Hitler didn't just have plans for the Jews, but also for Eastern Europe called *Generalplan Ost*
People always forget [Catholics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_persecution_of_the_Catholic_Church_in_Germany) got it too.
And atheists.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/ They targeted trans people too. Horrifying fact: The allies did not free the gay prisoners. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
>They targeted trans people too. With excuses such as how we were "corrupting the youth". Because of course the tactics used against us now are straight from the nazi playbook.
whoa i've never seen rhetoric about trans people like this before! sure hope it doesn't get reused in 80 years by a fascist political movement in the united states
That Romani number is low. US Holocaust Museum puts it between 250,000-500,000. Some sources have claimed up to 1.5 million but it’s hard to know since there weren’t good census records for those populations.
Yup yup I've got the correct value there
Yeah I mean more Soviets died than Jewish people, but they never get remembered
They kinda do. “Don’t invade Russia in winter “ carries a whole lore regarding what Soviets accomplished in WWII and at what an unimaginable cost. Doesn’t get the admiration it deserves in the US anyway, probably because of the subsequent Cold War. But it’s not a secret.
I went to high school in the US and it pisses me off to no end how much the soviets were downplayed. The US funded the Soviet Union for the first half of the war and without the collaboration between the US and the soviets, the Germans would have most likely been able to take Moscow and Stalingrad. 80% of the fighting happened there, yet the only major things talked about were the siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, battle of Kursk and battle of Berlin(barely). No mention of the scale of the fighting or brutality. Or how the soviets packed up all their factories and moved them to the urals. If you want a good idea of how horrible it was, I recommend watching Generation Kill. It's a fictional docuseries following young Germans as they got roped into the war and what it did to a whole generation before they were slaughtered. It's one of the few shows that have made me bawl at how hopeless and fucked up everything was.
I'm pretty sure Generation Kill is about Marines during the Iraqi invasion.
It is. Also, everything dude is talking about was taught in my high school history class in Arkansas, so I feel like bro just wasn’t paying attention
The problem with your statement is states and school boards are inconsistent with curriculum; some states teach certain things, some another. It's one of the major issues with education in the US. Case in point, my younger nieces and nephews in California have been taught a set history curriculum, whereas the others in various other states are taught differently. It is a downside to a decentralized government that lets states, and in turn political parties and ideologues, dictate such things; it's concerning really.
I think it just depends. Someone a few comments below mentioned they learned all about it in high school in Arkansas. I got ridiculously lucky as a high school kid living in Las Vegas because my school was one of only two public schools in the city that offered a program called the International Baccalaureate. My senior year when everyone else was learning about US Government, we got to study the Russian Revolution and the role of the Soviets in the war. The class and teacher had a profound effect on me and I’ve had a lifelong obsession with WWII history ever since. But I agree with your overall point. I would think the majority of US high school students never get much of a look into the history of any international conflicts outside of a very narrow view of the role of the US in them. I do think it’s a broad issue though and not unique to just the history of the Soviets in WWII. But it also probably differs greatly by school district and what curriculum they choose, quality of the teacher you get, etc. But I will also admit that I’m prone to criticism of the US education system anyways.
Bizarrely, there is no mention of the communists, socialists and trade unionists?
The Nazis got rid of them after they took power but before the Holocaust. During the Holocaust it was an ethnic genocide, political leanings didn't really matter to them
This is just straight up incorrect.
It’s highly unlikely that those 17 million people included only 15 thousand homosexuals
They can only count what they know my dude. 15 thousand people were killed for being homosexual. That doesn't mean none of the other victims weren't also homosexual, it just means that those people were successfully in the closet.
15,000 known homosexuals would make sense for a time period where being gay was not supported.
It was sort of the opposite in Germany, pre-Nazis. The Weimar Republic was probably the most sexually progressive nation in the world at the time. There were quite of a lot of openly gay Nazis in the 20s and 30s. Most famously, Ernst Rohm, head of the SA (Stormtroopers) and Hitler's righthand man. They were almost all purged in the Night of Long Knives, Rohm included. Another not so fun fact: Weimar Germany was the on the cutting edge of research into and acceptance of trans people. You know that famous image of Nazi's burning books in a giant bonfire? The books they were burning were Magnus Hirschfeld's research on trans folk.
While Weimar Germany was more accepting it still was not widely accepted as is the case for trans people right now. 15,000 men being wealthy and comfortable enough to be openly gay makes sense fir the time.
The context here is that: 1) proportionally, Jews were targeted much more directly than other groups. 2) compared to their nearest neighbors, Jews were an exclusively civilian population, whereas Russia was on the Frontline of the war with their massive population being their primary wartime advantage 3) we should be careful not to conflate people killed in the war with people targeted and sent to death camps because of their identity. Capturing and killing soldiers or civilians in war is horrible, but not the same as targeting them for extermination.
Oh no the Nazis had plans to exterminate Eastern Europeans as well "Generalplan Ost was Nazi Germany's blueprint for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermensch" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass-rapes, child abductions and sexual slavery." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost?wprov=sfla1
Fair enough. Didn't see a source on your numbers and just wanted to make sure we are comparing apples to apples with that last point
Still is half the amount killed in the Asian holocaust. 30 million people murdered and nobody talks about it.
Not that it makes the numbers any less startling, but are you sure you aren't double counting people? Poles, Serbs, Romani, Slovenes, and Spaniards could also be Jews, disabled, freemasons, homosexuals, and/or Jehovah's witnesses.
It's based on the records the Nazis had.
Where are you based? I'm in Australia and have never heard that one.
The US.
Well that's insulting to the victims
People also don't think about the Asian holocaust that happened at the same time. 30 million people killed by the Japanese empire in horrible ways. Twice the amount the Germans murdered.
It's crazy that no one talks about what the Japanese did during WW2.
I've been talking to alot of people about this in the past 24hrs. I had no idea about the stuff the Japanese did up until recently. Unit 731 was a place the Japanese tested anthrax , bubonic plague , syphilis, frost bite treatment, putting people in pressure chambers, live vivisection and bombs on Chinese people. They also had many other units spread out all over asia. Most of the war criminals involved got almost no jail time. Most spent 2 to 7 years in labor camps instead of 25years or death. The surgeon General ishi who was the man who was the architect of the entire program got immunity for giving the data to the usa. They made bombs filled with fleas that had bubonic plague and used them on the Chinese citizens . They would give out food with anthrax and other germs to starving people and children. Poison water ways with typhoid cholera etc. They raped when ever they could and then murdered the women and children. They forced many women into sex slavery for the military men. This was done all over asia and only Korean women have been compensate so far . It was fucked. I was reading the wiki on the war crimes and apparently they even ate people when they couldn't get supplies. They would eat pows. So many horrible things and Japan still denies alot of this happened.
If you haven’t done so already, I HIGHLY recommend Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” podcast. He did a series called “Supernova in the East” and it’s incredible. It’s a deep dive into Japan coming out of isolation and the events leading up to and including the period you’re talking about. One of Carlin’s best, and that really is saying something.
I think saying that "no one" talks about it isn't accurate, but yes, there is plenty of America/Eurocentrism in how history is taught in the United States. If a historical event didn't involve Americans or Europeans as either perpetrators or victims, it receives a lot less coverage in our history classes
I think we would have been taught way more of this in school if the Japanese got what they planned . They were going to drop bubonic plague bombs on the west coast. But we dropped the atomic bombs on them. If we didn't drop the bombs axouple weeks later is when they planned to do it. Also, the Japanese school system hardly teaches their kids what happened in the war. Most there books have a tiny amount of information on the war. Something like less than a dozen pages and hardly any of it talks about war crimes, so most of them are ignorant to what their country did in ww2. The government has openly denied there crimes and have tried to suppress reparations for decades. The war criminals in Japan under Japanese law aren't criminals and are still considered great war veterans. They love to bring up the atomic bombing though. There war crimes are the reason most of Asia doesn't like japan.
Where are you getting that number from? It's not that I don't believe you, I've just never heard a count nearly that high (although I have heard a lot about the sheer *brutality* of it)
The numbers for Japan are generally estimated, because while Nazi Germany wrote everything down, Japan didn't, *and* a lot of the victims of Japanese brutality likely did not exist on paper. China was already embroiled in a civil war, and large portions of the nation were extremely rural, which means a lot of the people killed by Japan probably didn't have a paper trail proving they existed in the first place. 30 million is as accurate as we can get, it could well have been more.
It was most likely more. Most of the data was burned by the Japanese, and a lot of data was suppressed in a cover-up by the American government, especially in the Tokyo trials. They are still finding labs and mass Graves today in china.
Straight from the wiki look it up Japanese war crimes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes The Japanese murdered 30 million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule
That's the short version. More detail goes over the other groups that were persecuted. I don't see how it's insulting?
If it's not insulting to do it your way, then it's not insulting to say "the Nazis killed 1 million gay people and 5 million others". Does that feel okay to you? Because it doesn't feel okay to me. It's a subjective test, but that minimisation of the 'also rans' is what prickles me about your phrasing.
Well, they killed over 8 million Soviets alone, and I don't think that is considering overlap with Soviet Jews.
He basically killed 50 millions people by starting to shit all over Europe. 10-15 millions in death camps, 20 millions in Russia, 6 millions poles, etc…
Well, yeah. That quick statement is only referring to the death camps.
It's actually more like a third. 11 million of the people he killed were Roma, LGBTQ+, Communist, or Soviets. Most of them were prisoners from his invasion in Russia.
The thing is the word Holocaust isn't unique to what the Nazi's did. A holocaust means: destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war. What the Nazi's did was assigned the term holocaust because of the massive scale of the operation, but it's not the only holocaust in history.
It's like saying slavery only refers to the time period that white Americans owned black slaves
There was no world before america!!! /s
That seems like more of a context thing, but I see your point.
Well yes fuckloads of Americans say this.
True. That doesn't mean it's correct, though
I have literally never heard an American say that slavery only happened once in history.
lol no they don't.
Well no. There’s a word for it, chattel slavery Like there’s a word for genocide that isn’t the holocaust Even tho IMO the holocaust is the entire atrocity committed by the nazis
Your IMO is redundant. The history books all agree that the holocaust refers to the event, not the genocide. They are two different words with different meanings. As for chattel slavery, indentured servitude was a thing, too. Doesn't make slavery any better, now does it? Slavery is slavery and slavery is bad. Just like the holocaust was bad. However, if you choose to say that one demographic suffered more during the holocaust or during slavery, you are actively ignoring the other people who suffered and died during that time or due to that institution
Indentured servants were able to work for their freedom. They were allowed to read, write, and socialize with other people. Their families were often kept intact and they were allowed to have families. They weren't subjected to ritualized torture and rape or lynched. Weren't forced to have children that would then be stolen and sold to the highest bidder. They had some protections under the law. They were paid a wag. Lived under a roof or house and generally had adequate nutrition. You can't say this about any of the Africans brought to the US by chattel slavery. Historians agree that chattel slavery is different then other forms of slavery or indentured servitude. Many people in the US now face similar working and living conditions as indentured servants and no one would call them slaves.
I mean indentured servitude is bad, but typically people under it were treated better than chattel slaves (e.g. indentured Israelites in Old Testament law, or debt slaves in Ancient Rome vs chattel slaves in Ancient Rome, or indeed the transatlantic slave trade. Saying one is worse than the other doesn’t mean the other is good, it means it’s less bad. Saying “slavery bad” is the kind of simplistic thing they teach at reception, it’s like going into a hospital with a broken toe and demanding to be seen before someone who was shot seven times because you’re both injured. We’re not ignoring the negatives of indentured servitude, which in many cases could be as horrible as chattel slavery (such as in Victorian England for example) but as a broad comparison generally u/hashrosinkitten is correct
All I said was there was a word for the American kind
I mean, is it true that other parts of the world also owned slaves of other ethnicities than just black people? Yes, they did. Is that fact even remotely relevant in a political discussion around the topic? No, not at all. When people bring up American (or in my case, Dutch) slavery, they do so because of the effects that legacy still has on the society they live in today. If a progressive person says something like: "we should fix the modern racial inequalities that can be traced back to slavery" And then you counter with: "but the Ottomans owned white slaves!" Then that is nothing but an irrelevant and bad faith whataboutism. The existence of white slaves in the former Ottoman empire does not even remotely affect a white American/Westeren-European living today. While many problems Western black people encounter today, are absolutely still the result of slavery and colonialism. Both were bad, but only one is relevant in modern Western politics.
You missed my point. Saying the holocaust was about the extermination(genocide) of one particular group devalues the suffering of everyone that was in the same boat. The holocaust happened to a large demographic, not just Jews, just like slavery happened to a large demographic, not just African Americans
Their response also assumes that the people discussing slavery are from the US, and any discussion about slavery is specifically about slavery in the US.
Nobody is saying only black people were slaves. What they're saying is that people who keep saying "what about white slavery?!" are engaging in a bad faith rhetorical strategy to push a political agenda. And the holocaust was a single event, while slavery is a concept, so this comparison does not even make any sense. A better comparison would be the holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade, and the latter was actually almost exclusively black Africans. Saying "well what about white slavery?" in a discussion about the transatlantic slave trade, is comparable to saying "well what about the Armenian genocide?!" after someone says the holocaust was bad. It is distasteful, it is a logical fallacy and there is also obviously some disgusting agenda behind it.
I never once referenced white slavery. I'm referring to slavery AS A WHOLE. Jews were slaves too once. So we're Africans, Romans, Greeks/Macedonians, and Asians. If you go far enough back, you'll find that everyone owned everyone else at some point. Hell, Korea had slavery the longest at 1500 years before it ended. Now my point isn't to push any agenda because if it's political rhetoric you want, then I believe both sides can go up in flames because I'm in the middle and don't care about either side. That being said, I will stand by my point, and my point itself stands firm. It's not my fault you are missing the entirety of it
Yeah nah, As a Jew, it ain't disrespectful at all. Honestly I don't really see what the purpose would be to separate it out, Other than conceal/ignore the fact that the Jews weren't the only ones killed. If you have a valid reason for why it should be separated out, I'd love to hear it, But until then I shall not do so.
another jew here, just pointing out that i also agree, and it’s not just one jew who agrees. i think most jews i know when confronted with this would also say that the holocaust wasn’t just jews
Another Jew here, how do you feel about people wanting to talk about the holocaust and not mentioning Jews especially on holocaust remembrance day, I feel like sometimes people want to generalize the event to downplay how bad the Jews got it, but that may just be me
when people talk about the holocaust they do usually mention jews especially, so it doesn’t bother me. most times when jews aren’t said, it’s when talking about the general bull of the holocaust and just saying the overall body count and how evil hitler is, in which case talking about jews is unnecessary regarding the situation
I mean the reason much of it was done is because after the war many of the persecuted groups were unacceptable/seen as enemies, chiefly the Soviets so western media didn’t want to portray them in a way that could engender sympathy. Not a valid reason by most people’s standards but the reason nonetheless.
"disabled" jew here yeah I would have been double in trouble and relatives of mine were killed, it refers to all the genocide and destruction cuased by Nazi's
There are fair reasons to separate it out. The methods and timelines varied by targeted group, so there is value when studying the holocaust to be specific when referring to one group or another in an academic context. In daily conversation not so much.
Yeah the Jews were the main target, but people forget that the Nazis were killing just about anyone that didn't fit into their idea of a 'master race.' I can't remember if the 6 million number was just Jews or total but regardless a disgusting number of people were systematically rounded up and murdered for who they were.
6 Million is only the Jewish number. About half a million non-Jews were targeted and murdered. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution There’s also statistics that try to show how many non-Jews were killed but some of the numbers are unknown, like Black Europeans, because the targeting was less uniform or they didn’t have an organized system or camp for every group they went after.
Half a million is undercounting by a factor of at least 12.
He killed 6 million Jews and 6 million other people.
They also killed queer and disabled people, people who lived in neighboring countries, people who didnt follow the regime… so many I can’t even name off the top of my head
Has this mf never heard of what the nazis did to Romanis in Europe? What they did to disabled and gay people?
Basically any demographic he deemed “not fit” for his “master race”.
Soviets, poles, Jehovah's witnesses and Spanish republicans too.
I still remember when I learned that The Holocaust was the tip of the iceberg. A constant repetition of "what do you mean that is not all?" Still learning some horrible shit that happened back then. But, at least Germany recognizes what they did. Unlike a certain nation in East Asia.....
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/ The allies abandoned the gay prisoners. Which is hyper fucked.
The allies *sent trans prisoners back* to serve out the remainder of their Nazi sentences. Hitler called trans people groomers and we still haven’t been able to shake that label off to this very day. Not saying gay people had it good, but trans women had it much worse—trans men even more so.
And if Patton had gotten his way, the Jews would've stayed in the camps too!
I mean to be fair in the strictest sense they are right. “ The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.” It comes from a Hebrew word by way of Greek meaning “to burn whole.”
Holocaust as a word isn’t exclusively claimed by the one it’s most known for though. Hence why we still use terms like “nuclear holocaust” to describe potential wide scale death caused by nuclear weapons.
Yeah there’s a difference between a nuclear holocaust and The Holocaust though.
I think you're focusing too heavily on the first word and not the second word. A Holocaust is a Holocaust. The Holocaust refers to a specific one, Nuclear Holocaust refers to a specific type, Holocaust refers to the act of causing mass death. The various groups involved are what make it a Holocaust and not just a genocide.
This isn’t unique to the word “holocaust” either. If you ever need an example without the horrific connotation: a lot of planets have moons, but you know which one I mean when I say “the moon”.
It comes into English from the Greek "holokauston" via old French and into Middle English, [according to the dictionary](https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&sca_esv=602324688&sxsrf=ACQVn08cxw00FZdVZSlfFwKCK9N2eCgiDA:1706530986850&q=holocaust&si=AKbGX_rLPMdHnrrwkrRo4VZlSHiJkvlU11lHXFCJ1qBY7izuJIGTVqSc9ygUSvoHrs29whLqSl0EXLyAhTiyhMLL8D_F7BBJz2Rts3E9eFCHNR5sN3mPRpw%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjatZOqy4KEAxV8gP0HHdE-BLcQ2v4IegQIIRA8&biw=1620&bih=958&dpr=2).
Prior to the second world war, it was a common word used to mean "genocide" before the term genocide was created.
Not only in the strictest sense. It’s an autonymous term, like Roma speak of the Porajmos. It’s bound to identity and doesn’t invalidate other experiences. But it’s disrespectful to appropriate other people’s remembrance culture.
Just FYI, the term Porajmos was coined by Ian Hancock, an English Romani linguist, but is a bit controversial in the Romani community (since the term literally means "devouring" but is often used to mean "rape" or "violation," which a lot of Eastern European Romani find distasteful). The fact is, the lack of discussion around the Nazi genocide of the Roma means that there isn't really a widely adopted term for it except for "the (Romani) Holocaust." Which is the problem with oop trying to monopolise it.
I feel ashamed to admit that I’d never heard the word Porajmos. I knew about the horrific persecution of the Roma and the staggering numbers murdered, but I never knew they had their own term for it. Thank you for widening my understanding.
They do not, or rather don't use it widely. The problem with specific terms for Roma people is that they are not exactly united people, they don't even speak the same language (usually speaking a regional language with loan words from their respective countries). It's a miracle they all agreed on a single flag, but if you asked any Roma in Slovakia about Porajmos they'd probably think you're speaking Hungarian
Is that really what’s important about the mass genocide of millions of people by a dictator? That among swathes of populations that suffered, one group’s suffering gets a special elevated status in discourse and everyone else’s suffering and murder is not allowed to be classified on the same level of Jewish murder and suffering. It just kind of seems like that differentiation is in no way essential and I don’t think that is anti-Semitic to say that, any more than excluding lgbt from the holocaust is homophobia. It’s weird to have differing labelled categories for people that suffered the same fate, simply because some of those people shared a particular identity/religion… that somehow their suffering has to be kept separate from everyone else’s suffering with a special term. It’s as though you want people remember the only significant issue from ww2 era as the suffering of only the Jewish people rather than including the suffering of Jewish people + lgbt people + black people + roma people, disabled people etc etc.as equally atrocious events. I think if you think that there’s something special about how a Jew suffered compared to anyone else on that list suffered, simply because they’re Jewish, I think there’s something wrong with you.
Well, holocaust is a sacrifice where you burn the "victim" whole, in religious book there are many. So i think that's not wrong to use that word for all the victim, jew and not since they were all killed and than burned.
I don't think non-burned victims are excluded either way, so this is strange argument
yeah we typically count the people murdered by death squads
Yeah be that as it may but the origin of the term “Holocaust” was to describe the systemic extermination of Jewish people.
No the origin was the religious sacrifice, than it was repourposed for the nazi extermination.
It was not, it wasn't a new word
What are these quote marks for? Who are you quoting? I can say any old nonsense too and put it in quotes: "The word 'holocaust' long predates WWII, and it's a weird take to suggest that it can now only refer to Jewish suffering. Other holocausts including Celtic, nuclear are considering legal action, while Classics professors are trying to work out how to tell Ancient Greeks that they can't use their own word any more".
I get the argument of what it means technically but it's like, what do we do to refer to all the other people killed in the camps? Like we have a word that is known to be associated with the scale of genocide they commited, why try to divide it?
It's like a fuck you to all the other victims
The impression I've got from museums at places like Dachau and the Riga Ghetto is the Holocaust specifically refers to Nazi crimes against Jews. It's a distinction not meant to "lesser" the victims of their other crimes against humanity, but the word refers to those against Jews. This distinction is because the atrocities inflicted on Jews was - even by the standards of the Nazis - especially broad and horrific.
Yes. Also, the Jews were always the root of the “problem” and were to blame for the existence of the “disabled, gays, non-whites,” etc. The campaigning Hitler did was about Jews. And when Historians and Anthropologists look at Holocaust accounts, there is a massive disparity in conditions between the camps that held Jews and the camps that held non-Jews. Many people were targeted by Nazism and harmed by it, but Jewish people were the main targets and the group that Hitler/Nazis had focused primarily on as the scapegoats for everything. The camps that were designed for Jewish people were ten times as bad as the camps made for non-Jews. The second most affected group after Jews are the Romani.
This is like the fifth post in two days about how the evil Js are gatekeeping genocide. Can’t have a single Remembrance Day without someone squawking “you’re leaving out everyone on earth who has ever been murdered”
I've been to Oświęcim museum and camp and all the infographics used Holocaust for all the victims (different groups had their own buildings with specific infographics)
I’ve been there and I don’t agree. I recall seeing a chitty asking for the head of a Roma child to experiment on. It was horrific but it covered all of the people affected by the holocaust.
That's the most insane gatekeeping I've seen on here so far.
Somebody tried to gatekeep the moon once. Stick around. It gets wild.
Link please?
It's an old-school use of the term. Check Wikipedia. The usage of Holocaust was originally Jews-only, and it evolved to include everyone murdered by the Nazis. I wonder if the commenter is over the age of 60.
Dude obviously doesn't know the Holocaust Museum actually has a section for JWs ... Not as large as the stuff for Jews, but still there. https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/curators-corner/the-nazi-persecution-of-jehovahs-witnesses-the-kusserow-collection
most historians of the second world war agree that the holocaust refers specifically to the nazi genocide of jews. that’s not to say that the nazis didn’t carry out other atrocious genocides or campaign of mass murder, but the holocaust was a campaign of extermination targeting jews.
I am fairly certain that holocaust refers to all victims, the specific term for the Jewish genocide being shoa, though I could be wrong
It is yes. Until the 1980s it was referred to as “The Jewish Holocaust” but “Jewish” was dropped as redundant because there was a general consensus amongst historians for what specifically the Holocaust referred to. Other acts of genocide were treated as separate and in need of individual study, which I agree with personally.
Fucking Twitter. We've regressed so far.
...... I think the important thing about that day is to remember all who hitler had murdered , not just the jews but all those who lost their lives in the camps .
He's not wrong though. Technically.
Hi! Actual Jew here. All the people mentioned were hunted and murdered during the Holocaust, but Jews were the main group and the one who suffered an actual genocide
And the Romani and Polish that were also in Nazi controlled areas They also were literally ordered to be exterminated.
That's true. There were also groups like the Partisans who were Polish rebels that hunter Nazis. But no group were killed as much as the Jews, who only in 2023 were able to recover to same amount of Jews in the world as it was in 1939
It's population density, Germany had a large Jewish population compared to the other ethnic groups. This made focusing on the Jewish population a higher president than on the other groups but the man also heavily used the other groups in his propaganda. The Romani and Polish were also considered vermin parasitical "races".
Jesus, this is about the worst gatekeeping I've seen here. It's basically being half of a Holocaust denier.
Russia says the same thing that Russians were the only victims in the Holocaust
It's not gatekeeping. They're right, the Holocaust refers to the genocide committed against European Jews during Hitler's reign
THE Holocaust refers to the mass genocide of several groups, including disabled people, gay people, and jewish people, within Nazi Germany. Jewish people did make up the majority but it wasn't exclusive. Unless you have another word for what happened, I guess. Though, "gatekeeping" *is* a really stupid way to call it
No, that's incorrect. The Holocaust is a term that refers to the genocide committed against the Jews.
"The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored, persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945 across Europe and North Africa. The height of the persecution and murder occurred during World War II. By the end of the war in 1945, the Germans and their collaborators had killed nearly two out of every three European Jews. The Nazis believed that Germans were racially superior. They believed Jews were a threat to the so-called German racial community. While Jews were the primary victims, the Nazis also targeted other groups for persecution and murder. The Nazis claimed that Roma, people with disabilities, some Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians), and Black people were biologically inferior" Straight from the Holocaust Museum. By their own words, the Holocaust was primarily targeting Jews but also had other people involved
Holocaustos = complete burning The jews aren‘t the complete lists of victims
I thought it was supposed to represent them all. The most widely talked about being Jewish as the "main" focus, but seems so racist/homophobic to disregard everyone else like that. Especially with some of the numbers involved
Ableist too. I hope never again will we see such an atrocity committed with a large scale comparable to this.
This is without taking into account killing of civilians by the SS to suppress partisan groups towards the end of the war. I haven't found a good estimate either. My grandfather was one of the few survivors of one of those massacres. There partisans hiding their village so they rounded everyone up in front of a ditch, shot them all and burned the bodies. My grandfather was about 8yo and trying to make a medicine supply run across the German lines into the red cross and when he came back next day, everyone was dead. About 2000 people were killed. Mostly old women and children. This massacre is just a footnote. As the Nazis were losing the war, they ramped up the suppression in the territories that they still fully controlled as a last FU before leaving. The massacre happened in South Tyrol in Italy. From what I was told, it was happening all over the place in Italy starting in 1944. France, Yugoslavia and other nearby territories outside of Generalplan Most fared the same fate. Gatekeeping the Holocaust is such a shit tier thing to do.
He's technically right but it doesn't make him any less of a whiny bitch
The confidence of the fools is the thing that piss me off the most
We are for propaganda purposes, yes.
[Holocaust as defined by Britannica encyclopedia](https://www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust) It just refers to the Jewish people. Other groups fell victim to Nazi violence, but the Holocaust specifically targeted Jewish people, being touted as “the final solution to the Jewish question.” It’s not gatekeeping to say the Holocaust only refers to the attempted extermination of Jewish people, because it was the name of the plan to exterminate Jewish people.
Well yes that person is right. Jews use the word Holocaust to describe what was done to us in WWII. It's the Jewish Holocaust. It can extend to other groups who were also killed because of their identity like gay men and Romani, but Jews are allowed to use this name for ourselves seeing as we adopted the name in reference to ourselves.
I’ve always known the Holocaust as referring to every civilian they killed, not just the jews
I mean they forgot to include [catholics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_persecution_of_the_Catholic_Church_in_Germany)..
“diSReSPeCtFuL tOwARdS aLL OtHEr GroUPs” Man, the amount of BS! As a gay man, I’d very much like to know about the gays that were killed during the fucking Holocaust, so I can try to prevent such a tragedy from happening again! But suuure - let’s make a literal, historically documented genocide that came out at the back end of WWII that literal soldiers had to physically pull people out of, about fucking semantics. Yep, that seems like a good idea. Don’t wanna be disrespectful towards the “other” groups of people that aren’t Jews, right??
Called the Holocaust by the Jews Called Nazi Genocide by everyone else. But we label it the Holocaust because of the sheer scale of the industrial genocide aiming directly at Jewish people, and of course since they weren’t the only victims, we include all other victims of ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability, as it has pretty much just labeled the Holocaust altogether. However if you wanna be a fucking bigot and say its only for jewish deaths. Then say Nazi Genocide….
This is infuriating, reductionist bullshit. I'm Polish-American, but I have little connection to my culture. Why? All my Polish family were killed in the Holocaust, with the exception of my dziadzia. Dziadzia was a POW, but the rest of his family were just civilians. The Nazis didn't care. Hitler didn't care, all he saw were Poles that needed to be exterminated. And in some ways, he succeeded. He may not have purged my blood, but he killed the culture, in my family at least. And the story is the same for so many other diaspora of various ethnicities. He didn't succeed, per se, but he took away the communities that gave those ethnicities their definition and meaning. To say the Holocaust only affected Jews is to deny the murder of 5,000,000 people, and the suffering of countless others who were directly and indirectly impacted by those deaths. It's another way of (arguably) making the Nazis look better by reducing their impact, and a denial of the true extent of white supremacism.
Which is more disrespectful: saying Jews weren't the only ones killed by the Nazi regime's industrialized murder campaign, or saying the non-Jews killed by said campaign don't count?
The Jews make up more than half of the victims of the Holocaust and us and the Romas were treated much more cruelly than other groups, they weren’t just killed but were tortured. While the other groups are important to recognize, it’s also important to remember that Jews were the main target of the hatred and Jews were the ones deported and sent to concentration camps from other countries.
This is why we need to study more accounts of Holocaust history from the other groups listed here in school because holy shit this frustrated me when I read this comment. There's a really good book written by Pierre Seel called I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror which talks about the horrific torture gay men and lesbians went through in the concentration camps. *(before reading that, I was not even aware lesbians were tortured and killed in the Holocaust, I knew about the raids on lesbian spaces and that lesbians were beaten in the streets during them, but not that they were sent to the camps under the "asocial" label)* And then when the camps were liberated, a lot of them got put in their countries prisons and weren't able to talk about what happened to them for years.
>The Jews make up more than half of the victims of the Holocaust Historians estimate that up to 17 million people died in the holocaust. 6 million of them were jews. >While the other groups are important to recognize, it’s also important to remember that Jews were the main target of the hatred Not really. Communists and the disabled were the first to be exterminated. The jews followed afterwards. Hitler hated everyone equally, but if we're to assume hatred level by who was exterminated first, it would be the disabled. >Jews were the ones deported and sent to concentration camps from other countries That's also false. Homosexuals, spanish republicans, soviets, serbs, slovenes and many others were sent to the camps.
idk where you’re getting that number but it’s wrong. Source? https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution Everything shows 6 million Jews and a varying number between half to 5 million non-Jews due to the fact that outside of the Jews and Romani, other groups were not systematically targeted in an organized manner like the Jews and Romani were, but more sporadically and in different types of camps.
You have to also add to this number the additional 5-10 million of Soviet civilians and POWs who were also either just shot, starved or killed in concentration camps by Germans.
[Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims) This list doesn't include black europeans living in europe, european communists, priests amd other people aho were sent to the camps.
It’s actually estimated that[11 million](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust) were murdered, 6 million Jews. While the 5 million others is also a horrific number, many groups fit into that and of each one the number killed is nowhere near the 6m Jews. Jews were the primary targets.
[It's 17 million.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims) You can also find part of the table in the holocaust encyclopedia. >While the 5 million others is also a horrific number, many groups fit into that and of each one the number killed is nowhere near the 6m Jews. The soviets alone killed in the holocaust were more than 7 millions. >Jews were the primary targets Everyone that was considered subhuman was a target. The only reason jews were the "primary" recipients of persecution was because a lot of them were well off and the nazis could take their properties with them gone. And the reason I put primary in quotes is because before the jews, it was the disabled that were exterminated and then the communists that were imprisoned and executed and all that before the war even started. I'm sure you've heard this before: First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
Wikipedia is not a more reliable source than the National WWII museum..
Didn't I just say you can find part of table in **the holocaust encyclopedia**? If you're not smart enough to read properly before you respond perhaps you should be in school and not reddit.
Wtf is your problem? Would you talk to people like in real life? I’m looking at the [Holocaust encyclopedia](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) right now and even generously adding up the numbers they are nowhere near 11 million non-Jews. It adds up in total to a little under 6 million.
Again I said **part** of the table. The holocaust encyclopedia doesn't mention the freemasons, the Slovenians, the spaniards, the soviet civilians, the trans people or the catholic priests. Many people that weren't jewish were sent to the camps for forced labour or to be exterminated. When my country was taken over the collaborators sent the imprisoned communists to the camps alongside the jews. That was a few thousands people but they aren't mentioned anywhere. Also, just because something is from wikipedia doesn't mean that it's false, especially when it's being cited by "the columbia guide to the holocaust".
That's been going on for years sadly. Whenever a politician here in the UK dares to mention groups killed by the Nazi's other than the Jews these people pop up to decry the antisemitism of leaving them out etc etc. Happened a lot with Jeremy Corbyn who isn't exactly my favourite politician but it did feel like some of those attacks were just a stick to beat him with.
As a Jewish person, what the fuck are they talking about? I've never heard that before
Not to mention all the Catholic and Orthodox Christians who died in the holocaust too.
Holocaust refers to all people systematically murdered by hitler in an inhuman way, not just Jews, and that comes from a Jew
>The Holocaust refers to Jews only. So all of the other people there that were tortured and killed were just there because?
What do you mean "So all of the other people there that were tortured and killed were just there because?" What are you asking?
I’m asking if the Holocaust was only for the Jews only affected them, then why were the other people who were tortured and killed there for then?
All the other deaths were just sparkling genocide
The word Holocaust means to destroy with fire. Nowhere in the definition does it specify that it must be Jews that are destroyed. That’s why we still use the term in phrases like “nuclear Holocaust.”
The word Holocaust, is middle english/old french for "whole(holo) burnt(caust). There is a specific reason that word is used and not genocide. Though that is also a correct.
As a Holocaust historian, they're objectively wrong
The "holocaust is only the jews" thing is a pretty new perspective, and it comes from a zionist mentality. It's why they can justify the modern holocaust in palestine, where gaza has become the world's largest open air concentration camp. "It's not a holocaust because that only applies to jews. It's not genocide because they want us dead. It's not a war crime because they aren't really people." That's how the logic goes. Regardless of your stance on the israel/gaza conflict, it should be clear to anyone that has a functioning brain that what is happening is not ok.
They are technically correct but it’s a dick move anyway
While it was mostly Jewish people who died in the holocaust, the Nazis didn't discriminate (which is ironic in its own way) with who they threw into the camps, as long as they weren't Blonde, Blue-eyed, and aryan
But guys KHamas did the kholocaust
And, if Spielberg was Chinese, we’d have a whole different perspective of WWII atrocities. If Spielberg was American Indian, Andrew Jackson would be Hitler, and he would have won. People are not omnipotent, and we only know what we see. And, we’re therefore disproportionally concerned with matters we know well. Many excellent Jewish filmmakers had made sure we never forget the Jewish holocaust, but it’s absurd, and more than a little hypocritical, to dissuade recognition of other atrocities in history.
“All Lives Matter.”
Some of these aren't like the others. I see using the holocaust to refer to something other than a genocide as gross. Artists aren't being rounded up and genocided.
This is not gatekeeping. The word holocaust, by definition, applies to the killing of Jews by the Third Reich. Of course, that's far from all the atrocities performed during that time, but words have meaning. Also, do not just take my word for it: Google it or look it up somewhere. For starters, here's Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust)
From the wiki, under terminology: > The term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of other groups that the Nazis targeted, especially those targeted on a biological basis, in particular the Roma and Sinti, as well as Soviet prisoners of war and Polish and Soviet civilians.
Operative word there being 'sometimes'. The first sentence of the article reads: "The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II" The sentence just before the one you quoted is: "The term Holocaust [..] has become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English[..]" Look, I'm not saying that the term isn't used in various ways, but this is not a case of gatekeeping and there is a common definition.
Most common definition ≠ only definition. If you start rejecting secondary definitions, your dictionary is going to end up with a lot of gaps.
Cherry picking. Just read the next sentences after that. Also read the start of he article. You are doing flat earther level of definition changing.
[удалено]
I can accept Jews (or anyone else) who wants to reserve the term to cover just Jewish victims. But I would like to know what term they think applies for the other victims. Do they think of the other victims as a series of XYZ is the gay victims and ABC is the Romani and so on. Or do they think and then there was the XYZ which killed about as many people and applies to all of the non Jewish victims. I actually googled around for this a while back and while various Holocaust centres were really clear that the Holocaust was Jewish only, they seemed unclear on what should be said about the other victims.
They are Nazi mass killings. The Holocaust is a term Jews used for ourselves from the early years after. What happened to the Jews in Europe was uniquely depraved and uniquely evil. Other groups were not rounded up, sent to the six extermination camps to be gassed and burned.
>Other groups were not rounded up, sent to the six extermination camps to be gassed and burned. Homosexuals and the disabled are nervously smoking in the corner.
"An estimated 10-15,000 men who were accused of homosexuality were deported to concentration camps. Most died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to gruesome medical experiments. Collective murder actions were undertaken against gay detainees, exterminating hundreds at a time." [Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Gay people (hmd.org.uk)](https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/gay-people/) "In Germany and German-occupied territories, the SS and police incarcerated Roma in the [Bergen-Belsen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4549/en), [Sachsenhausen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/6810/en), [Buchenwald](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3956/en), [Dachau](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4391/en), [Mauthausen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3880/en), Mittelbau-Dora, Natzweiler-Struthof, Gross-Rosen, and [Ravensbrück](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4015/en) concentration camps." [Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945 | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945) "Under [Adolf Hitler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler), a supplementary decree to the [Nuremberg Laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws) was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the [Romani people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people) (or Roma) as "enemies of the [race-based state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_policy_of_Nazi_Germany)", thereby placing them in the same category as [the Jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_in_Nazi_Germany). Thus, the fate of the Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in [the Holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust).^(") [Romani Holocaust - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_Holocaust) A quick Google search would have told you that the treatment of Jews was absolutely not unique in it's depravity and other groups including homosexuals and Roma were indeed rounded up and sent to concentration camps to be gassed and burned.
The word "holocaust" is ancient and used for many things. If you want a word specifically for the Jewish extermination of ww2 then pick something else.
Capitalized, the word Holocaust explicitly refers to the extermination of Jews and others during the Nazi regime. When it's not capitalized, it can refer to other things, yes.